Saturday, December 31, 2016

In today’s digitized, high-definition world—in which
real-life, flesh and blood humans from the most mundane walks of life, willingly
subject themselves to near-medieval levels of torture in an effort to achieve
the burnished, robo-mannequin sheen of Photoshopped magazine covers—I don’t
think it’s possible to lampoon our culture’s extreme youth-addiction and
obsession with physical perfection.

Happily, in1992 (ten years before Botox, and back when Cher
and Michael Jackson were the reigning poster kids for plastic surgery excess) director
Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forest Gump) made this demented and dark
comedy which broadly burlesques contemporary society’s two most dominant
religions: the worship of beauty and the fear of aging.

"Wrinkled, wrinkled little star...hope they never see the scars."In the original screenplay the line was "Wrinkle, wrinkle, go away, come again on Doris Day"a lament uttered by Elizabeth Taylor in 1980's The Mirror Crack'd

In this self-professed nod to Tales from the Crypt (the comic-book-based HBO anthology series for
which Zemeckis co-produced and occasionally directed) Death Becomes Her is a comedy-of-the-grotesque cartoon that posits
the dream of eternal youth as a upscale zombie nightmare. Set in a baroque, just-barely exaggerated vision of Beverly
Hills where the thunderclaps and lightning flashes all hit their marks and know
their cues; Death Becomes Her spans
51-years (1978 to 2029) in chronicling the ceaseless competition between two college
frenemies. A bitter rivalry every bit as combative and twice as deadly as Batman vs Superman…only with better
dialogue and smaller busts.

Meryl Streep as Madeline Ashton

Bruce Willis as Dr. Ernest Menville

Goldie Hawn as Helen Sharp

Isabella Rossellini as Lisle Von Rhuman

Former Radcliffe classmates Madeline Ashton (Mad for short)
and Helen Sharp (Hel for keeps) are the kind of friends that only a shared alma
mater could produce. Though we ultimately come to learn that they are but two antagonistic
sides of the same counterfeit coin, but when first glimpsed, the artificial
Madeline and the apprehensive Helen couldn’t be more dissimilar, and are
clearly friends in name only.

Plain-Jane Helen, an aspiring author of a soft-spoken,
diffident character and unconcerned with appearance, has a history of having
her boyfriends stolen by the ostentatiously glamorous Madeline. Madeline, an
obscenely shallow, superhumanly self-enchanted actress of questionable talent, is all surface charm and charisma, but otherwise appears totally devoid of a single redeeming character trait. She concerns
herself with looks and appearances to the exclusion of all else.

"Tell me, doctor...do you think I'm starting to NEED you?"

The women's heated rivalry temporarily assumes the guise of a romantic
triangle when beginning-to-show-her-age Madeline sets her sights upon (and
effortlessly steals) Helen’s fiancé, the bland-but-gifted Beverly Hills plastic
surgeon Ernest Menville. Of course, there’s no romance to this romantic triangle
at all, what with Madeline’s interest in the colorless dolt being solely of the
self-serving variety (she gets to assert her desirability superiority over
Helen while simultaneously securing a lifetime of free nip/tuck services), but the
last-straw betrayal by both fiancé and friend proves enough to send poor milquetoast
Helen right over the edge.

What's The Matter With Helen?

Cue the passage of fourteen years. Everybody is miserable
and nobody winds up with what they thought they wanted. Madeline, career and
looks in decline, is blatantly unfaithful to husband Ernest and goes to Norma Desmond
extremes to stay young. Meanwhile, emasculated Ernest has succumbed to alcoholism
and is reduced to plying his surgical skills on corpses.

But it's Helen who rises like an
Avenging Angel from the doughnut crumbed, canned-frosting ruins of her
nervous breakdown. Magnificently svelte, newly glamorized, channeling her inner
Madeline, and, after several years of therapy, imbued with a Dolly Levi-esque sense
of purpose (“For I’ve got a goal again!
I’ve got a drive again! I’m gonna feel my heart coming alive again!”). Naturally, Helen's goals aren't anywhere near as lofty or honorable as those of that musical matchmaker's; Helen's newfound purpose is to reclaim her life through the eradication of Madeline’s.

Hel Goes Mad and Dedicates Her Life To Making Mad's Life Hell

Alas, Helen’s strength of resolve is all well and good, but homicidally
speaking , the best laid plans of mice and men are doomed to failure when the man in question (Ernest) is a mouse. By the same token, it's perhaps not the best idea to wage a to-the-death battle when both combatants, thanks to the supernatural intervention of a raven-haired sorceress and her
immortality potion, can’t really die.

I saw Death Becomes
Her for the first time on cable TV in the mid-‘90s, and I immediately
regretted never having seen it in a theater. I thought it was outrageously
funny and I imagined seeing it with an audience would have been an experience similar
to my first time seeing What’s Up, Doc?:
the laughter being so loud and continuous, you have to see the film twice in
order to pick up all the lost dialogue. I’ve no idea if public response to Death Becomes Her was anywhere near as vociferous
(it’s a weird little film), but I found it to be one of the most consistently
funny comedies I’d seen since the ‘70s heyday of Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder, &
Madeline Kahn.

Incorporating a comic book sensibility and B-horror movie
tropes into a dark satire of those frozen-in-time animatronic
waxworks endemic to the environs of Beverly Hills, Death Becomes Her provides director Robert Zemeckis an ideal
vehicle to indulge his fondness for absurdist special effects. The screenplay,
a best-of-both-worlds/ Frankenstein collaboration between TV sitcom writer
Martin Donovan (That Girl, The MTM Show) and action/adventure
writer Martin Koepp- (Jurassic Park,Mission impossible), deftly maintains a balance of broad action (think Tex Avery cartoons or Bugs vs Daffy Looney Tunes) and
oversized characterizations.

Which brings me to Death
Becomes Her’s strongest attribute: its cast. Streep, Hawn, and Willis—talented
professionals all—had, at this stage in their careers, fallen into that movie
star rut of delivering exactly what was expected of them, nothing more. Recent
releases had shown each actor delivering reliable-but-unexceptional
performances in so-so films. Professional, journeyman-like performances devoid
of either spark or surprise.

But Death Becomes Her—in
casting against type—taps into something fresh in each of them. With abandon they
lose themselves in the outlandish, outsized characters they’re called upon to
play, blowing away the cobwebs of predictability from their individual screen
personas. Together they form an unholy trinity of bad behavior and treat us to
give the liveliest, most unexpected, enjoyably over-the-top emoting of their
careers.

Madder 'n Hell(Mad, Ern, & Hel)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

When television broadcasts changed from analog to digital,
and I purchased my first HDTV, one of my strongest recollections is of how
dazzlingly crisp and clear it was, and simultaneously how clinically
unforgiving it was to human beings.

TV shows I had grown up watching in their natural fuzzy
state were so clear! Images were so sharp I could make out the weave knit twill
fibers in Fred Mertz’s jacket.

But my lord, the havoc it played with people’s faces. It was
like you were looking at everyone through a dermatologist’s magnifying glass—bringing
to mind that line from Cukor’s The Women“Good grief! I hate to tell you dear, but
your skin makes the Rocky Mountains look like chiffon velvet!”

I don’t know what it was like elsewhere, but the cumulative
effect HDTV had on local Los Angeles newscasters and even minor TV
personalities was to have men and women scrambling to the plastic surgeons in a
mad rush reminiscent of the final reel to The
Day of the Locust.

Over the last decade or so, the already youth and looks-obsessed
entertainment industry has seen a normalization of the kind of rampant surgical
restructuring that once caused Mickey Rourke and Meg Ryan so much grief. The artificially
enhanced appearance has now grown so common; it has become the new aesthetic.

What Price Beauty?

And while everybody seems fine with health-related elective surgeries
like dental and Lasik, people still harbor strong opposing opinions about those who turn
to medical science in order to turn back the clock, retard the aging process,
or sculpt and reconfigure themselves to fit a particular beauty standard.

Death Becomes Her
is no serious treatise on our culture’s preoccupation with youth and slavish
devotion to beauty, but by addressing these hotpoint issues in a comical, bigger-than-life framework—it manages to be one of the sharpest and to-the-point.

PERFORMANCES

Broad, farcical comedy of the sort employed in Death Becomes Her is awfully hard to
pull off (1991’s Soapdish comes to
mind…unfavorably). In fact, the main reason I didn’t see Death Becomes Her when it was released was because the trailer so turned
me off. Not only did it look far too exaggerated and silly (it recalled Streep’s
She-Devil, a film I absolutely hated),
but in addition: I never much cared for Bruce Willis; Goldie Hawn’s post-Private Benjamin output had grown
increasingly derivative, and the continued forays into comedy by Streep-the-Serious
(Postcards from the Edge, Defending Your Life) had the effect of subduing her talent, not showcasing it.

It surprises me a bit to glance over Bruce Willis' long list of credits on IMDB and come to the conclusion that Death Becomes Her is the only film of his I like. He's so good here. Funny and touching, and providing the grounded emotional contrast to his co-stars' magnificent maliciousness

But what always brings me back to rewatching Death Becomes Her is how all the elements
gel so smoothly. Everyone from composer Alan Silvestri to the film’s vast army
of FX wizards are all on the same comic book page. Best of all, the actors and
their pitch-perfect performances are never dwarfed by the dated but still-impressive special effects.

The comedy is too dark to be everyone’s taste, likewise the tone
of exaggerated non-reality; but for me, all these disparate elements coalesce to create a
howlingly funny film that feels like a major studio version of those reveling-in-bad-taste underground/counterculture comedies like Andy Warhol’s BADor John Waters’ Female Trouble
(which could serve as Death Becomes Her’s subtitle).

The arresting Isabella Rossellini is a special effect all unto herself. Alluring and dangerous, she is a dynamic, unforgettable force in her brief scenes

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

A major highlight of Death
Becomes Her is getting to see the great Madeline Ashton in full diva-fabulous
mode appearing onstage in a misguided musical version of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth. A play, appropriately
enough, about an aging star making a comeback. The time is 1978, and, as described
in the screenplay, our first glimpse of 40-ish Madeline is of her “Singin’ and dancin’ up a storm seemingly
without benefit of training in singin’ or dancin’.”

The song she’s singing is a riotously vainglorious paean
to self, titled “Me,” and the production number is a compendium of every star-gets-hoisted-about-by-chorus-boys
Broadway musical cliché in the book. The number is terrible—from the song itself, to the costuming,
choreography (they break into “The Hustle” at one uproarious point), and the over-emphasized
“stereotypically gay” voices of the chorus boys—and therefore, it's also absolutely brilliant.

What's great about the number is that without benefit of inserting any intentionally comedic elements (save for a ceaselessly shedding feather boa) it manages to be side-splittingly
funny and cheesy as all get-out merely by channeling any number of '70s variety shows. As a quick glance at
YouTube will attest, nothing about Madeline's dance routine would be out of place on an episode of The Hollywood Palace, The Ed Sullivan Show, or take-your-pick Mitzi Gaynor TV special.

Although Madeline is supposed to be awful, Streep is actually quite marvelous. Her musicality and phrasing is spot on. Her movements are sharp, she never misses a beat with any of her gestures, and there's an effortlessness to the number of small bits of comic business she's able to insert into the performance without ever losing her stride. What really makes the number so hysterically funny is the level of Las Vegas showroom self-satisfaction her Madeline radiates. No one could tell Madeline she's not stopping the show and bringing down the house with this ridiculous number, and her genuine obliviousness to the silliness surrounding her makes for a priceless moment in wince-inducing musical cinema.

The first time I saw Streep perform "Me," what immediately popped into mind was the 1986 Academy Awards telecast. That was the year Teri Garr opened the show with a truly cringe-worthy production number around the song Flying Down To Rio that was every bit as atrocious as Madeline's First Act closer (even down to the same tearaway skirt and hyperactive chorus boys). Further cementing the recollection: Meryl Streep, who was nominated that year for Out of Africa, when interviewed about the show afterward, expressed her enjoyment of Garr's performance and her wish to someday be invited to sing and dance in a production number like it. She got her wish.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Like Sweet Charity, Fatal Attraction, and the musical version of Little Shop of Horrors, Death Becomes Her is a film whose original ending was jettisoned due to unfavorable preview response.

Grotesquely disfigured and unable to maintain themselves with any level of precision, Madeline & Helen attend Ernest's funeral in the year 2029

In the original version, after escaping from Lisle's, Ernest fakes his death and runs off with Toni (Tracey Ullman, the entirety of whose footage ended up on the cutting room floor), a sympathetic owner of a local bar he frequented. Jump ahead 27-years, Madeline and Helen, still beautiful and perfect, are in the Swiss Alps, bored with life and bored with each other's company. In the distance they glimpse an old, hunched over, toddling married couple. Madeline comments on how pathetic they are, Helen, as she watches them walk away, hand in liver-spotted hand, is not so sure. We learn that the couple is Ernest and Toni, now very old, but very much in love. Fade Out.

I absolutely adore that ending! Test audiences claimed the more poignant conclusion didn't fit the more cartoonish flavor of the rest of the film, so rewrites and reshoots resulted in the very good, very funny ending the film currently has. It's not a bad ending at all, and based on the success of the film, is perhaps more in keeping with the tone established at the start; but honestly, I just love the idea of the jettisoned ending. I think it would have provided the perfect coda for a wonderful film.

Helen and Madeline, talons sharpened, become living gargoyles

BONUS MATERIAL
Goldie Hawn discusses her preference for the film's original ending HERE

You can read the original screenplay in PDF form with all the deleted material HERE

The original theatrical trailer features many scenes that never made it into the final film. HERE

Thursday, December 8, 2016

“Don’t come any closer. Don’t come any nearer. My vision of
you can’t get any clearer.”

Girls Talk Elvis
Costello 1979

In Mike Nichols’ Carnal
Knowledge, college buddies Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Art
Garfunkel) engage in an awful lot of girl talk. Or, more to the point, a lot of
awful talk about girls.

Each weighs in on what qualities constitute the “ideal
woman”; they speculate on their chances of “getting laid”; they rate women’s
body parts in an effort to determine her desirability, aka worth; they rate and
evaluate physical intimacies as though they are sports statistics, charting the
speed of numbered bases reached (1st base, 2nd base, homerun) vs.
the number of dates logged. They equate a woman’s susceptibility to their seduction
ploys as evidence of her virtue: if she succumbs too easily she’s a slut, if
she resists for too long, she’s a ballbuster; and they bemoan the fact that, no
matter how perfect, a woman is never beautiful enough, submissive enough, or
ANYTHING enough to sustain interest over an extended period of time.

Jonathan & Sandy: Amherst College, Massachusetts - Late 1940s

The casual dehumanization serving as the sexist throughline
in all of Jonathan and Sandy’s incessant girl talk is attributable, at least in
part, to the callowness of youth (when introduced, both boys are virginal teens
at Massachusetts’s Amherst College) and reflective of the repressed sexual
mores of the American middle-class during the late-1940s (their creepy sexual banter is similar to the same kind of talk played for nostalgic/sentimental humor in Summer of '42, released the same year). However, as Carnal Knowledge follows the fault-finding
Jonathan and ever-questioning Sandy through some 20 years of friendship, we come
to see that neither the passage of time nor America’s evolving sexual landscape
does much to alter the content, timbre, and tone of the conversations between these
two perennial hard-y boys.

Older, But Not WiserSandy & Jonathan: New York - Early 1960s

As each fumbles and stumbles their way through dating,
marriage, “shacking up,” and parenthood—with love and tenderness making only
fleeting appearances, and then, more often than not, couched in erotic desire—the
overall impression we’re left with is of two men who’ve approached sexual
exploration not as a journey of discovery, but as a quest to have firmly
established ideas about women confirmed or disproved. Self-reflection and
introspection play no part, for the male gaze is ever outward and always infallible.

Faced with the option of uncomplicated fantasy over unpredictable reality, men who grow old without benefit of growing up invariably opt for holding onto the wish for the unattainable, unsullied, idealized dreamgirl. Proving perhaps that one can acquire carnal knowledge without learning a single thing.

Jack Nicholson as Jonathan Fuerst

Ann-Margret as Bobbie Templeton

Arthur Garfunkel as Sandy

Candice Bergen as Susan

Carnal Knowledge screenwriter Jules Feiffer (Little Murders, Popeye) conceived of his dark comedy of sexual bad manners as a stage
play, but director Mike Nichols told the famed cartoonist/author/playwright that
he saw it instead as a film. As such, the movie has a stylistically theatrical
feel to it, both in the dominance of language (the script is sharp as a razor)
and the frequently used device of making it appear as though a character is
breaking through the fourth wall and speaking directly to us. The cramped
framing and preponderance of close-ups makes the world of Jonathan and Sandy seem strangely underpopulated,
isolated, and self-centered (in the way dreams and memories often appear to
us), while at the same time feeling confessional and all-too intimate.

Most distinctively, Carnal Knowledge retains a
classic theatrical three-act structure that neatly divides the arrested-developmental
stages of its two leads into chapters mirroring America’s shifting sexual mores.
Each era designated by the significant woman in the life of Jonathan, the
film’s chief chauvinist.

Both Jonathan and Sandy
fall hard for Susan, a neighboring student at SmithCollege
who looks like the WASP dreamgirl: i.e., she superficially embodies the
era-specific attributes deemed ideal for assuming the role of girlfriend, wife,
and mother. But Susan is no passive male fantasy figure. She's postwar woman emergent. Straining against gender constraints and just as uncertain of how she is supposed to "be" in the uncharted territory of sex and relationships, Susan is intelligent, opinionated, ambitious, and conflicted. In short, an actual complex human being during
an era when all that’s expected of her is ornamental perfection. Things between these three get
messy in a hurry.

Carnal Knowledge explores how both men and women can feel pressured into engaging in sexual activity

Jonathan is now an accountant of some sort, single, embittered
by a string of unsatisfying relationships, and still searching for his “perfect
woman” (the ideal whittled-down by this stage to an exacting checklist of physical
specifications). Sandy, now a physician, is married to Susan and lives in a passionless
suburban rut he takes great pains to justify to Jonathan. Susan, though unseen,
sounds as though she has matured into precisely the kind of vaguely dissatisfied
Smith-graduate-turned-suburban-housewife Betty Friedan surveyed as the basis
for her groundbreaking feminist tome The
Feminine Mystique.

Although in the film 29-year-old Bobbie is an enticing older woman to 20-something Jonathan, in real life, Ann-Margret (who really WAS 29) was four years younger than co-star Jack Nicholson's 33.

Into Jonathan’s life comes Bobbie, a TV commercial model who
is the physical embodiment of the Playboy
ideal and Jonathan’s fantasy-girl come to life. Unfortunately, since Playboy magazine fails to disclose just how one goes about living day-to-day with an individual one needs to objectify for the purpose of sexual arousal, things begin to head south for the pair rather rapidly; the pliant, none-too-bright
bombshell who only wants to get married and have kids proving an easy and
willing emotional punching bag for Jonathan’s aggression, scorn, and
callousness.

"I wouldn't kick her out of bed!"Jonathan's favorite expression of feminine endorsement is realized in its most literal, ironic terms with Bobbie, the sexualized dreamgirl whose depression and willing subjugation results in her almost never getting out of bed

That the blossoming and eventual disintegration of their relationship
plays out almost exclusively within the confines of their bedroom (a playroom turned prison) underscores the realization that Jonathan's and Sandy's quest to align adolescent
sexual fantasy with adult reality is a task far beyond either of their capabilities. Easily the most emotionally brutal and devastating section of the film, Act II of Carnal Knowledge lays bare the battle of the sexes in a way that spares no one. As the
men approach middle age, wondering whether their teen ideals will ever be realized, it becomes obvious that neither knows any
more about women than they did in their days at Amherst.

The college buddies have grown older, but only
chronologically. Sandy, sporting sideburns, shaggy moustache, and pot belly
over his bell-bottomed jeans, has found a kind of restless peace in his midlife
romance with a hippie young enough to be his daughter (Carol Kane). Jonathan, very
successful, very alone, and something of a drinker (and looking uncannily like '80s-era Robert Evans), is reduced to regaling
guests with a self-narrated slideshow titled “Ballbusters on Parade!” in which
the sad spectacle of a lifetime of empty sexual conquests are trotted out and disparaged
in escalatingly vulgar terms (sort of like the published autobiographies of Tony
Curtis and Eddie Fisher).

As the film nears its conclusion, we’re left with a sense that Sandy’s
endless searching (ever external, never within) might perhaps eventually lead
to some level of fulfillment; after all, he at least concedes that there is a
great deal about love he doesn’t know. But Jonathan, firm in the cynic’s
resolve to mistake mislearned lessons for wisdom, thinks he has it all figured
out. What he has gleaned from twenty-some years of acquired carnal knowledge is
revealed in the memorized, methodically recited, misogynist monologue delivered
by Louise, the prostitute the now-impotent Jonathan must regularly visit.

The Misogynist's MaximAble to achieve arousal under only the most compulsively controlled circumstances, Jonathan has Louise ritualistically recite a carefully prepared (pitiful) speech designed to reassure him of his male dominance.

If, as Mike Nichols once remarked, Carnal Knowledge is about the fact that men just don’t like women
very much, I’d say the only thing surprising about that statement would be anybody
attempting to refute it. Certainly not in today's world where the crude, dehumanizing
sentiments attributed to Jonathan (a character whose woman-hating harangues brand
him shallow and contemptible) sound eerily like what America shrugged off during this recent shitstorm of an election as appropriate “locker-room talk” from “boys”
well into their sixth decade running for the highest office in the land.

Has "Boys Will Be Boys" always meant "Boys Will Be Hollowed-Out Husks of Shame & Self-Loathing"?

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

My strongest memory of Carnal
Knowledge when it first came out is how shrouded in secrecy it was. Beyond its
provocative title and the prestige implied by the collaboration between highbrow
satirist Jules Feiffer and Hollywood wunderkind Mike Nichols (his Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -The Graduate winning streak took a hit with the costly flop of Catch-22), little to nothing was known about
the film’s content in advance of its release.

Nichols’ reputation for extracting unexpected performances
from his actors made Carnal Knowledge’s
unusual cast a prime focus of interest. For who but the man who deglamorized
Elizabeth Taylor to an Academy Award win would have the nerve to assemble in
one film: getting-along-in-years up-and-comer Jack Nicholson; high-pitched
pop-singer Art Garfunkel; beautiful but glacially aloof “actress” Candice
Bergen, and, most intriguing of all, maturing sex kitten and industry punchline
Ann-Margret.

After having a 1972 obscenity verdict overturned, Carnal Knowledge was re-released in 1974 with new poster artwork. In 2001 Mike Nichol's Closer recreated that ad's quadripartite portrait design

Carnal Knowledge
was promoted with a minimalist ad campaign so calculatingly discreet—white text
against a stark black background, the title in scarlet letters—it proved
tantamount to wrapping the film in a plain brown wrapper. Imaginations ran wild
as the public (essentially doing the studio’s work for them) envisioned a film
of such sexual explicitness and candor, no advertising dare elaborate.

I was 14 at the time and desperately wanted to see Carnal Knowledge. Imagining it to be just
the kind of cerebral smut my parents would begrudgingly allow me to see (provided
I name-dropped a few choice critique sources like Saturday
Review or The New York Times), but no such luck. My parents had active
imaginations, too, and I’m afraid I underestimated the combined effect Ann-Margret
and the word “carnal” would have on their faith in my adolescent maturity. Forbidden from seeing the film, I had to content myself with borrowing a copy of Feiffer’s published screenplay
from the local library. I didn't get around to actually seeing Carnal Knowledge until the 1980s.

Carnal Knowledge is not one long misandrist harangue about how terrible men can be. As J.W. Whitehead notes in the book "Mike Nichols and the Cinema of Transformation," the women are also prone to exploitation and are often subtly complicit in their objectification.

Arguing that the ability to lie to oneself is the greatest
special effect known to man, and that nothing is more exciting or dramatically
compelling as emotional conflict; these films are my action movies, my
superhero flicks, my adventure sagas, and (non) CGI thrill rides.

I’m drawn to films of emotional violence because physical
violence is mere kid’s stuff by comparison. Americans have always found it
easier to face a gun than to face themselves. These movies, when as honest and
insightful as Carnal Knowledge, are
very humane in their perspective, insightful in their compassion. And like all
good art, they have the potential to lend order an air of poetry to what in
real life is often merely chaos and banal cruelty.

Never Trust Anyone Who Begins a Sentence with the Words "Believe Me"In 1971, a line of dialogue branding Jonathan contemptible and superficial. Today, likely a 3am tweet from a 70-year-old cretin.

What inspired my revisit to Carnal Knowledge is the degree to which the baby-man words and
behavior of a prominent celebrity in our recent election (he is no
political figure by any stretch of the imagination and his name will go
unmentioned on these pages) exposed and solidified the unassailable reality that
America’s misogyny (like its racism) is so systemic, deep-rooted, and essential
to the perpetuation of the status quo; we as a culture actually reward men for never growing up. I agree with the assertion by Feiffer and Nichols that Carnal Knowledge is about the fact that men don't seem to like women very much; but to that I'd also add that, in the end, men clearly dislike themselves even more.

Rita Moreno as Louise

PERFORMANCES

I've met young film fans who, having grown up with the Ann-Margret of Tommy, The Return of the Soldier, The Two Mrs.Grenvilles, and A Streetcar Named Desire, were more surprised by her sex-kitten past in Bye Bye Birdie and Kitten With a Whipthan by her startling, career-rejuvenating turn in Carnal Knowledge.
She's is indeed outstanding and gives a very moving performance every bit deserving of her Golden Globe win and Oscar nomination; but looking at the film today, I'm more surprised that Jack Nicholson's performance escaped Academy notice. He's perhaps the oldest-looking college boy on record, but he is electric to watch and plays Jonathan with a naked complexity I can't believe many others could mine so effectively. In truth, everyone in Carnal Knowledge shines brightly, and the performances have only grown richer with the passing of time.

Carol Kane as Jennifer

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
In our heteronormative culture, we've devised names for men who hate women (misogynists), and women who hate men (misandrists); but I've yet to come across a suitable word for the parallel cultural phenomenon of gay men who hate other gay men (the word homophobe doesn't cut it for me). I bring this up because, as a gay man, I only see Carnal Knowledge as being partially about the battle between the sexes.

Ken Russell's Tommy (1975) reunited Jack Nicholson and Ann-Margret

When I can listen to Jonathan and Sandy talk in degrading terms about women and associate those exact same dehumanizing phrases to experiences I've had listening to gay men talk about other gay men in locker rooms, dance studios, bars, gyms, and supermarkets; I recognize toxic masculinity is not limited to straights. While definitely one of cinema's most acerbic visions of male-female sexual politics, the ragingly heterosexual Carnal Knowledge also has a lot to say to the gay male viewer about the ways our culture teaches ALL men (gay and straight, alike) that sex, masculinity, and "maleness" has to do with dominance, objectification, and a disdain for vulnerability.
But that's for another essay at another time.

BONUS MATERIAL

In 2001, Vanity Fair reunited the cast and director of Carnal Knowledge for this spectacular group portrait by photographer Annie Leibovitz

In November of 1988 at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, Jules Feiffer revived his theatrical version of Carnal
Knowledge.

A few excerpts from a truly jaw-dropping "Ladies' self-help book" book published in 1945 (its attitudes chillingly reflective of Carnal Knowledge's first act) titled What Men Don't Like About Women by Thomas D. Horton. Clearly the Steve Harvey of his day.

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LIZ SMITH'S COLUMN - Feb. 18, 2016

Raves for Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For...: "I suggest that everybody who loves movies — and has a good sense of humor — visit this site, which has been around for about five years. Mr. Anderson writes lovingly, intelligently and wittily about movies he adores. And not just the usual suspects, either, although they are abundant. He takes seriously, more or less, 'bad' films such as 'Valley of the Dolls' or Elizabeth Taylor's famously campy 'Boom!' This is a great site, with fine writing and an unusual perspective." (Click on banner for full article)

About Me

"Life is too short without dreaming, and dreams are what le cinema is for."

This blog gets its title from a lyric to a song from the 1982 Broadway Musical, "Nine" by Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston. This blog explores my lifetime love affair with the movies and examines the specific films that are, truly, the stuff that dreams are made of.

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AMERICAN CINEMATHEQUE: Classic Movies on the Big Screen as They Were Meant to be Seen

The Aero Theater in Santa Monica / The Egyptian Theater, Hollywood. Click on marquees for Calendar

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Rated #3 on "HOT SHEET" Top Ten List (3/9/12)

BLOG: Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For ... Ken Anderson's hypnotic blog — fabulously illustrated with movie screen caps — takes its title from a lyric from the musical Nine, so it's not surprising that his insightful writing about his lifelong love affair with movies is so deliriously entertaining. You'll fill up your Netflix queue after reading Anderson's reappraisals of an eclectic mix of films, including the heretofore unappreciated Ann-Margret vehicle Kitten With a Whip and one of Streisand's lesser musicals, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, which are written with the same zeal as his takes on acknowledged masterpieces such as Robert Altman's sprawling Nashville. Jeremy Kinser

Let's Face The Music & Dance

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